A little over eight years ago my world fell apart, and I stopped writing. To my readers, I apologize for going silent.
My husband of forty years abandoned nearly everything in his life. And that included me. For quite a long season, I unwillingly found myself in a wilderness of grief. Even worse to behold my children’s sorrow, anger, and disillusionment.
The upheaval of divorce and its inevitable fallout is a very sad and traumatic part of my story. But it’s not the only thing that happened to me in the last eight years. The real story is how God encamps around the brokenhearted. How He showed up in my world.
Frank C. Laubach wrote a letter to his father in a time of great loneliness and despair. He stated that there is “no substitute for meeting God soul to soul and face to face. Ah, I know now that it was by cutting the very heart of my heart…by suffering. Nobody can make a violin speak the last depths of human longing until that soul has been made tender by some great anguish. I do not say it is the only way to the heart of God, but I must witness that it has opened an inner shrine for me which I never entered before.” [1]
I understand his meaning here. Perhaps you do too.
Laubach lived an amazing life. Among many other things, he served in the Philippines and was the only missionary to be commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp for his work to change illiteracy. His program’s slogan, “Each One, Teach One,” brought literacy to 60 million people.
I mention this man because it’s a prime example of how God’s speaks to us in everyday circumstances. Here’s what happened.
While working on my first book, Closer Than Your Skin: Unwrapping the Mystery of Intimacy with God, my writing mentor Cecil Murphey told me about one of Laubach’s books—Letters by a Modern Mystic. He said my writing themes were very similar. Sadly, it was out of print. A few months later, a friend actually bought this book for me and said, “You need to read this.” It had recently come back into print. Then while cleaning out my parent’s small library, I noticed two books by Laubach on their shelf!
“Do you know this man?” I asked my mother.
“Oh, yes. He was a friend of your grandparents. In fact, he was traveling through and stayed overnight at our house on Maplewood,” she replied.
I was stunned. What were the chances of that? Heat flooded my face.
“But …I don’t remember him.”
“Well, you were only around three years old.” She smiled. “He brought an inflatable beachball that was a globe…and he put you squarely on top of it!”
Was it a coincidence? A supernatural intersection of life? Only God knows.
However, it occurred to me, that Laubach’s desire to know God face to face, also became my deepest longing. And suffering became a doorway to experience God more than I ever imagined. While I am no one of consequence, my simple God stories have traveled the world. And that is what I have to offer—stories of what knowing God looks like in an ordinary life. I learned to recognize the stirrings, the whispers, the moving of the Holy Spirit by listening to other people’s stories and experiences. And so “each one, teach one” may be exactly what God has in mind.
“People over all the world are withering because they are open toward God only rarely,”[2] Laubach wrote.
In restarting my blog, maybe my stories will help you notice more of God in your world of divine happenstance.
[1] Letters by a Modern Mystic, by Frank C. Laubach, Purposeful Design Publishing, 2007, pg. 18.
[2] Ibid., pg. 31.
